What is going on in Westwood? Excuse me, I mean what is going on at Exposition Park? These guys look awful, are about to go 0-2 and Reeves is suspended indefinitely? I thought they were going to be real good. Very surprised by all this, well except Reeves having a hissy fit, but with the Wear twins and Smith they shouldn't miss him THAT much, I mean enough to lose to LMU and Mid Tenn St. 11 minutes to fix this mess.
PG Zeek Jones is having an atrocious start to the season. They didn't have a replacement ready for SG Malcolm Lee - didn't expect Malcolm to put his name in the draft. Had ZERO replacement for starting SF Tyler Honeycutt - again, didn't expect him to go in the draft. The plan was for all three to be replaced in 2012 with Kyle ANderson, Jordan Adams Dominic Artis and Shabazz Mohammad.
Reeves Nelson is incredibly talented, but a head case. I'm beginning to think maybe CLINICALLY a head case. Rather than rising to the challenge of competing for minutes at the 4 with the Wears, he apparently imploded.
Anthony Stover, probablay the best defensive center in the Pac (last half of the season, Ben playd both Smith and Stover via situational substitution on offense and defense), suffered an injury in preseason, and is out for at least another 3-4 weeks.
Brendan Lane, a rising Jr who was a top 75 player out of high school has somehow fallen deep into Ben's doghouse. Didn't play at all the first game, got put in for less than minute in tonights loss.
With the talent they have they should still be a decent team, but Ben Howland is stubbornly still trying to have them play full time man D, and his remaining players just don't have the quickness or athleticism to do that.
I'm sure they'll right the ship - be playing well by the time they come to MSG. But it may not be pretty along the way.....
Another problem is players who've exited the system. Mike Moser, a soph transfer from UCLA, debuted for UNLV with 16 pts and 20 rebounds. He's playing along side UCLA tranfer Chace Stanback, who averaged 15/7 for them last year on their tourney team. Drew Gordon is another transfer - he's starting for New Mexico - he averaged a DOUBLE DOUBLE for them last season, and doing the same again this year. And if you follow the BYU forums, they've conceded that their pg is a stopgap till 2nd semester starts, and UCLA transfer Matt Carlino, has dominated in practice for a year, and won the starting job replacing Jimmer Fredette. But because he played 7 minutes in a UCLA exhibition game last season before transferring, he has to sit out the first semester this year.
There are reasons each of them are gone, but as you can see, that's still an awful lot of talent "blood-letting" - 4/5s of a potential starting lineup....
My personal worry is that UCLA was getting burned in recruiting after their 3 Final Four stretch (during, as well), and Ben revamped his coaching staff, with guys who focus on recruiting. And as with Kyle, and potenttially Shabazz, it seems to be working. But I question just how good of COACHES the coaches are. Phil Matthews has an excellent pedigree (D-2 Head coach, D-1 Head coach at USF, but back as asst. at Nebraska for 4 years before coming to UCLA. But the other two assistants are blank slates. Scott Garson was the Video Coorinator. And the other Assit has never coached college - he's an AAU coach.
